Currently, consumers interested in acquiring services must first identify the service provider who is capable of providing the required services. This usually means perusing a telephone directory, which can become frustrating and time-consuming if the service providers telephoned are not immediately available. A phone book (whether a bound paper book or an electronic directory) is also not very effective if the service provider's business category is unknown.
The availability of some telephone book services over the Internet has somewhat lessoned the time involved in finding a service provider. The present Internet-based systems, however, fail to address other issues such as facilitating the contact between the consumer and the service provider.
Moreover, a service provider may receive many requests from various consumers at the same time, which may be humanly impossible to respond to individually. For example, a qualified tax consultant may be inundated with tax questions on April 14th. The tax consultant may have previous obligations (e.g., legal or personal) to existing consumers, which would have to take precedence over new consumers.
Filtering through thousands of emails or phone calls is a cumbersome task, especially when there is limited time to respond. One solution would be to have different phone numbers and email addresses for different types of consumers. This presents obvious drawbacks associated at least with costs and the effort in sifting through the messages or calls.
Another solution would be to hire employees for a temporary situation (e.g., tax day rush). However, the temporary employees may not be trained sufficiently or unavailable at the particular time. Hiring employees may also involve numerous overhead items, for example, additional taxes, additional space, etc.
More generally though, the current state of the art allows anyone to call and at any time—telemarketers, ex-girlfriends, unwanted business partners. To deal with this problem, one can use human filters, such as secretaries or personal assistants, who “gate keep” for executives. One can also turn his or her phone off, but then the phone is off for everyone. For instance, one's spouse would not be able to call in an emergency.
Another problem is that people have to file many phone numbers for a single person depending on whether they might be at home, work, or on their cell phone. Moreover, caller ID services generally do not provide a solution because they do not always have the caller's name. Additionally, for each of the telephone addresses, people have to remember the digits of a phone number, which in actuality are the digits of machine language.